By Doug Draper
Get ready for a few big changes in the way Niagara, Ontario’s residential waste is collected at curbside.
New waste collecton trucks about to roll out across the region. Photo by Doug Draper
Starting this coming Monday, February 28, if you live in a single family home in Niagara, the amount of household trash destined for a landfill site will be limited to no more than one bag per home per week, unless you want to purchased $1 tags to put out more.
To some who’ve never really caught on to recycling, that one-bag limit may seem like a downer. But here is the upside for the environment and for the more avid recyclers among us. Start this same week, you will now be able to put out your Blue and Grey boxes every week, along with your Green Bin, instead of alternating weeks for paper and cardboard and for plastics and bottles and cans.
“This is a big day,” said the Niagara regional government’s chairman Gary Burroughs as he gathered with other regional representatives and members of Niagara’s new waste collection contractor, Emterra Environmental, to welcome the coming launch of the new collection program. “There will be hiccups along the way,” Burroughs added of the usual glitches that arise when a new company is taking over a region-wide service of such magnitude, “but we are ready to get going and to make it work successfully.”
Niagara regional councillor for Pelham Brian Baty joins Emterra CEO Emmie Leung as her company prepares to take Niagara’s waste collection program to a ‘greener’ level.
Emmie Leung, CEO of the Burlington-based Emterra Group that has set up a local office and truck depot in St. Catharines, added that her company “is here as a member of the Green community and to be a member of this (Niagara) community. We are ready to make this happen.”
Emterra’s fleet of waste collection trucks, with the words; ‘More recycling, less waste – Rethink your waste,’ emblazoned on the sides of the trucks, takes over from Modern Waste Management that lost a competitive bid to continue collecting residential waste across the region last year.
Brian Gogo, general manager for Emterra Environmental, told Niagara At Large Emterra has rehired 95 per cent of the drivers who worked for Modern and has also hired more than half of those who jump on and off the back of the trucks to collect the waste. And unlike Modern, Gogo said Emterra is hiring those people on the back of the trucks fulltime and offering them health and dental benefits.
If you want to learn more about the new waste collection program, including the soon-to-be-implemented ban on collecting grass clippings, visit the regional government’s website at www.niagararegion.ca and follow the links., or the waste management info-line at 905 356-4141 or 1-800 594-5542.
For more information on the Emterra Group, visit that company’s website at www.emterra.ca .
(Visit Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to residents in our greater Niagara region and beyond.)
Niagara At Large 
Very glad to hear Emterra is hiring those people on the back of the trucks fulltime and offering them health and dental benefits. Not sure why, but some of us always assumed that the heavy work of “garbage collecters” was well compensated with a good hourly wage of possibly up to $18. an hour. So I for one was not impressed to learn that most were hired from Labour Ready type organizations who claw back part of the hourly wage in exchange for doing the human resources portion of the job, leaving workers with only about $10. or $12. an hour. One rather slim worker told me that at the end of his shift he always felt like “his arms were going to fall off”.
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